Displacement
A car dealer is boosting a new sports model to a prospective client:
'You get into this car at midnight and at 4 a.m. you are in Grimsby.' The customer is indignant: 'And what am I to do in the middle of the night in Grimsby?'
The question is perfectly logical, but irrelevant to the subject under discussion, which is the speed of the car. The link-concept is 'Grimsby at 4 a.m.' -- which in one context plays the accidental part of an improvised example, in the second an essential part. This sudden shift of emphasis -- or displacement of attention -- to a seemingly irrelevant aspect of a bisociated concept is frequently found not only in humour, but also in art and discovery (Chapters VIII, XXIII). It is related to the paradox of the centipede, but instead of displacing attention from the whole to the part it is displaced from a dominant to a previously neglected aspect of the whole, showing it in a new light.
In the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" there are two unforgettable lines:
How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?
The broken heart has become such a cliché that its physical implications -- splitting apart and creating a gap -- are never thought of. Wilde shifts our attention to that forgotten physical image; he lets salvation enter through the aching gap, like a thief in the night. When the Red Queen complains: 'It's a poor son of memory which only works backwards,' she is putting her finger on an aspect of reality -- the irreversibility of time -- which we normally take for granted; her apparently silly remark carries metaphysical intimations, and appeals to our secret yearning for the gift of prophecy -- matters which would never occur to Alice, that little paragon of stubborn common sense.
Coincidence
It was once usual to classify comedies into those relying on situations, manners, or characters. In his discussion of the first, Bergson came closest to the essence of humour: 'A situation is always comic', he wrote, 'if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.' One feels like crying 'Fire', but a couple of pages further on Bergson has dropped the clue and gone back to his hobby: the interference of two independent series in a given situation is merely a further example of the 'mechanization of life'.
In fact the crossing of two independent causal chains through coincidence, mistaken identity, confusion of time and occasion, is the most clean-cut example of bisociated contexts. The chance-coincidence on which they are hinged is the deus ex machina, the intervention of providence in both tragedy and comedy; and, needless to say, lucky hazards play an equally conspicuous part in the history of scientific discovery.
Nonsense
One type of comic verse lives on the bisociation of exalted form with trivial content. Certain metric forms, such as hexameter and Alexandrine, arouse expectations of pathos, of the heroic and exalted; the pouring of homely, trivial contents into these epic moulds -- 'beautiful soup, so rich and green' -- creates a comic effect of the same type as the parody. The rolling dactyls of the first line of the limerick, carrying, instead of Hector and Achilles, a young lady from Stockton as their passenger, make her already appear ridiculous, regardless of the calamities which are sure to befall her. In this atmosphere of malicious expectation whatever witticism the text has to offer will have a much enhanced effect.
Instead of an epic mould, a soft, lyrical one will equally do:
... And what could be moister Than tears from an oyster?
Another variant is what one might call the pseudo-proverb: 'The rule is: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today.' Two logically incompatible statements have been telescoped into a line whose rhythm and syntax gives the impression of being a popular adage or golden rule of life. Sometimes the trick is done by the substitution of a single word in a familiar text: 'One should never work between meals.' The homely, admonitory structure lulls the mind into bored acquiescence until the preposterous subterfuge is discovered. Oscar Wilde was a master of this form: 'In married life three is company and two none'; 'the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it', etc., etc. My own favourite coinage is: 'One should not carry moderation to extremes.'
Nonsense humour -- as Max Eastman has pointed out -- is only effective if it pretends to make sense: It's a fact the whole world knows / That Pobbles are happier without their toes. Even with rhymed gibberish the illusion of meaning is essential. 'The slithy toves' that 'gyre and gimble in the wabe' evoke sound associations which suggest some kind of action even though we are unable to say what exactly the action is -- perhaps some small creatures gyrating and gambolling on a brilliant day in the web of some flowery bush. The meaning varies with the person as the interpretation of the ink blots in a Rohrschach test; but without this illusory meaning projected into the phonetic pattern, without the simultaneous knowledge of being fooled, and of fooling oneself, there would be no enjoyment of the jabberwock with eyes aflame' who 'came whiffling through the tulgey wood / And burbled as it came.
Tickling
The harmless game of tickling has resisted all attempts to find a unitary formula for the causes of laughter; it has been the stumbling block which made the theorists of the comic give up, or their theories break down.
It was at one time believed that the laughter caused by tickling is a purely mechanical reflex in response to a purely physical stimulation. But -- as Darwin has pointed out -- the response to tickling is squirming, wriggling, and straining to withdraw the tickled part -- activities which may or may not be accompanied by laughter. The squirming response was interpreted by Darwin and Crile as an innate defence mechanism to escape a hostile grip on vulnerable areas which are not normally exposed to attack: the soles of the feet, the neck, arm-pits, belly, and flank. If a fly settles on the belly of a horse, a kind of contractile wave may pass over the skin -- the equivalent of the squirming of the tickled child. But the horse does not laugh when tickled, and the child not always. As Gregory has put it:
A child fingers the pepper-pot, waves pepper into its nose, and sneezes violently. Touch it under the arm-pits, or finger its waist, and it wriggles vigorously. It sneezes to dislodge the pepper from its nose, and its wriggle suggests a sneeze to relieve its whole body. The violent squirm of the tickled child so obviously tries to avoid the tickling hand that, when the truth is perceived, it is difficult to understand how tickling and laughter could ever be identified or confused.[3]
Thus tickling a child will call out a wriggling and squirming response. But the child will laugh only -- and this is the crux of the matter -- if an additional condition is fulfilled: it must perceive the tickling as a mock attack, a caress in a mildly aggressive disguise. This explains why people laugh only when tickled by others but not when they tickle themselves. (The question why this should be so was once put to a BBC Brains Trust which, after some humming, hawing, and giggling, decided that it was one of the insoluble mysteries of human nature.) Not only must there be a second person to do the tickling, but her expression and attitude must be mock-aggressive -- as mothers and nurses instinctively know. Battle cries like 'peekaboo' and 'bow-wow' pay guaranteed dividends, like the comedian's imitation of the lion's roar. As in every attack, the element of surprise plays an important part: the expert tickler's tactics never let the victim guess when and where the next pressure or pincer movement will occur. Experiments in tickling on babies under one year old showed that babies laughed fifteen times more often when tickled by their mothers than when they were tickled by strangers. For naturally the mock-attack will make the baby laugh only if it knows that it is a mock-attack; and with strangers one never knows. Even with its own mother there is an ever-so-slight feeling of uncertainty and apprehension, the expression of which alternates with laughter in the baby's behaviour; and it is precisely this element of apprehension between two tickles which is relieved in the laughter accompanying the squirm. The rule of the game is 'let me be just a little frightened so that I can enjoy the relief
'.
Thus the mechanism is essentially the same as in comic impersonation: the tickler impersonates an aggressor, but is simultaneously known not to be one. It is probably the first situation encountered in life which makes the infant live on two planes at once, the first delectable experience in bisociation -- a foretaste of pleasures to come at the pantomime show, of becoming a willing victim to the illusions of the stage, of being tickled by the horror-thriller.
In adolescence, erotic elements enter into the game, and tickling assumes the role of a sexual mock-attack -- acknowledged with giggles which betray their origin in infantile apprehensions. Some homosexuals claim to be extremely ticklish and display a tendency to squirming and wriggling as an expression of mock-fright. But these are secondary developments which partly illuminate, partly confuse the original pattern -- the tickled child's laughter is a discharge of apprehensions recognized as unfounded by the intellect.
The Clown
Most of the comic techniques I have discussed can be found in the repertory of the circus clown -- the classic incarnation of the coarser type of humour. His face is a richly exaggerated caricature of stupidity, sometimes with an infectious grimace of laughter painted on it; in each piece of his apparel, form battles against function; each of his movements is a parody of grace. He is the victim and perpetrator of preposterous practical jokes; he is both human and inert matter, for to survive all the slaps, whacks, and cracks, his skull must be made of ebony. He is the image in the distorting mirror, the clumsy impersonator of acrobats, ballet dancers, and fairies: Caliban imitating Ariel. He is a collection of deformities, bodily and functional; he stumbles over obstacles and words; he is timid, gauche, eccentric, and absent-minded. Above all, he is the man of gigantic efforts and diminutive accomplishments: the midwife who aids the mountain to deliver the mouse.
The clown's domain is the coarse, rich, overt type of humour: he leaves nothing to be guessed, he piles it on. A good deal of the enjoyment he causes is a mild gloating, the discharge of sadistic, sexual, scatalogical impulses by way of the purifying channels of laughter. One means of producing and prolonging this effect is repetition . The clown and the clowning kind of music-hall comedian will tell, or act out, a long-drawn narrative in which the same type of flash, the same pattern, the same situation, the same key-words, recur again and again. Although repetition diminishes the effect of surprise, it has a cumulative effect on the emotive charge. The logical pattern is the same in each repeat, but new tension is easily drawn into the familiar channel. It is as if more and more liquid were big pumped into the same punctured pipeline.
Originality, Emphasis, Economy
I have discussed the logic of humour and its emotive dynamics, and have tried to indicate how to analyse a joke. But nothing has been said so far about the criteria which decide whether it is a good, bad, or indifferent joke. These are, of course, partly a matter of personal taste, partly dependent on the technique of the humorist; only the second is our concern.
There are, I shall suggest, three main criteria of comic technique: originality, emphasis, and economy. In the light of the previous chapters we shall expect them to play also a significant part in the techniques of scientific theorizing and artistic creation.
An art dealer (this story is authentic) bought a canvas signed 'Picasso' and travelled all the way to Cannes to discover whether it was genuine. Picasso was working in his studio. He cast a single look at the canvas and said: 'It's a fake'. A few months later the dealer bought another canvas signed Picasso. Again he travelled to Cannes and again Picasso, after a single glance, grunted: 'It's a fake.' 'But cher maître,' expostulated the dealer, 'it so happens that I saw you with my own eyes working on this very picture several years ago.' Picasso shrugged: 'I often paint fakes.'
One measure of originality is its surprise effect. Picasso's reply -- as the Marquis' in the Chamfort story -- is truly unexpected; with its perverse logic, it cuts through the narrative like the blade of the guillotine.
But creative originality is not so often met with either in art or in humour. One substitute for it is suggestiveness through emphasis . The cheap comedian piles it on; the competent craftsman plays in a subtle way on our memories and habits of thought. Whenever in the Contes Drolatiques Balzac introduces an abbé or a monk, our associations race ahead of the narrative in the delectable expectation of some venal sin to be committed; yet when the point of the story is reached we still smile, sharing the narrator's mock-indignation and pretended surprise. In other words, anticipation of the type of joke or point to come do not entirely destroy the comic effect, provided that we do not know when and how exactly it will strike home. It is rather like a game: cover my eyes and I shall pretend to be surprised. Besides, the laughter provoked by spicy jokes is, as already said, only partly genuine, partly a cloak to cover publicly less demonstrable emotions -- regardless whether the story in itself is comic or not.
Suggestive techniques are essential; they create suspense and facilitate the listener's flow of associations along habit-formed channels. A comic idea of a given logical pattern can be transposed into any number of different settings; local colour and dialect help to establish the atmosphere. The most effective stories are regional: Scottish, Marseillais, Cockney; the mere mention of 'a man from Aberdeen' establishes the matrix, the desired frame of mind. Thus suggestiveness depends firstly on the choice of relevant stimuli -- as the biologist would say. Next, all non-essential elements should be omitted, even at the price of a certain sketchiness, otherwise attention will be sidetracked, the tension frittered away: this is the technique of simplification. In the third place the effect is increased by certain emphatic gestures, inflections, a stress on dialect and slang: in a word, by exaggeration. We have met these three related factors: selection, exaggeration, simplification, in the technique of the caricature (and of the portrait and blue-print); taken together they provide the means of highlighting aspects of reality considered to be significant. It is not surprising that the same techniques enter into the artist's and humorist's efforts to communicate with his audience.
However, except in the coarsest type of humour and the trashiest forms of art, suggestion through emphasis is not enough; and it can defeat its own purpose. It must be compensated by the opposite kind of virtue: the exercise of economy , or, more precisely: the technique of implication.
Picasso's 'I often paint fakes' is at the same time original, emphatic, and implicit. He does not say: 'Sometimes, like other painters, I do something second-rate, repeitive, an uninspired variation on a theme, which after a while looks to me as if somebody had imitated my technique. It is true that this somebody happened to be myself, but that makes no difference to the quality of the picture, which is no better than if it were a fake; in fact you could call it that -- an uninspired Picasso apeing the style of the true Picasso.'
None of this was said; all of it was implied. But the listener has to work out by himself what is implied in the laconic hint; he has to make an imaginative effort to solve the riddle. If the answer were explicitly given, on the lines indicated in the previous paragraph, the listener would be both spared the effort and deprived of its reward; there would be no anecdote to tell.
To a sophisticated audience any joke sounds stale if it is entirely explicit. If this is the case the listener's thoughts will move faster than the narrator's tale or the unfolding of the plot; instead of tension it will generate boredom. 'Economy' in this sense means the use of hints in lieu of statements; instead of moving steadily on, the narrative jumps ahead, leaving logical gaps which the listener has to bridge by his own effort: he is forced to co-operate.
The operation of bridging a logical gap by inserting the missing links is called interpolation . The series A, C, E, . . . K, M, O shows a gap which is filled by interpolating G and I. On the other hand, I can extend or extrapolate the series by adding to it R, T, V, etc. In the more sophisticated forms of humour the listener must always perform either or both of these operations before
he can 'see the joke'. Take this venerable example, quoted by Freud:
The Prince, travelling through his domains, noticed a man in the cheering crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. He beckoned him over and asked: 'Was your mother ever employed in my palace?' 'No, Sire,' the man replied. 'But my father was.'
The logical pattern of the story is quite primitive. Two implied codes of behaviour are brought into collision: feudal lords were supposed to have bastards; feudal ladies were not supposed to have bastards; and there is a particularly neat, quasi-geometrical link provided by the reversible symmetry of the situation. The mild amusement which the story offers is partly derived from the malicious pleasure we take in the Prince's discomfiture; but mainly from the fact that it is put in the form of a riddle, of two oblique hints which the listener must complete under his own steam, as it were. The dotted lines in the figure below indicate the process (the arrow in M1 may be taken to represent the Prince's question, the other arrow, the reply).
Incidentally, Wilde has coined a terser variation on the same theme: Lord Illingworth: 'You should study the Peerage, Gerald. . . . It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.'
Nearly all the stories that I have quoted show the technique of implication -- the hint, the oblique allusion -- in varying degrees: the good little boy who loves his mama; the man who never aimed as high as that; the kind sadist, etc. Apart from inter- and extrapolation (there is no need for our purposes to make a distinction between them) a third type of operation is often needed to enable one to 'see the joke': transformation , or reinterpretation, of the given data into some analogous terms. These operations comprise the transformation of metaphorical into literal statements, of verbal hints into visual terms, and the interpretation of visual riddles of the "New Yorker" cartoon type. A good example ('good', I am afraid, only from a theoretical point of view) is provided by another story, quoted from Freud:
The Act of Creation Page 8